2006 Spring Assembly Chair's Report

Spring Assembly
May 15, 2006
LAUC-B Chair’s Report

This Executive Committee began its work last fall creating a goals and issues document. Three areas were identified: Diversity, the question of “What is a professional?” and the improvement of communication and building bridges. The nature of these goals is such that they can never be completed, but we have made progress. In the area of Diversity, we can point to the following accomplishments:

DIVERSITY
We have charged the Committee on Diversity to compile a list of the current procedures for hiring librarians in both The Library and in the Affiliated Libraries. We will hear a report on that work later this morning.

We encouraged all library staff to attend the successful Diversity in Action Forum on
May 9th.

We invited the Chancellor to speak on diversity and librarians this morning.

WHAT IS A PROFESSIONAL?
In the area of “What is a Professional?” we sponsored several events since our last assembly, including:
Brown Bag on LAUC Research Grants (12/6/05); Deirdre Mulligan on Google Book Search (2/23/06);
New Librarian Reception (3/15/06)—where we welcomed 25 new librarians. Brown Bag on the BSTF report (3/23/06).

We also:
• submitted a budget to the Vice-Chancellor which allowed us to increase our travel fund allotment by $75 per librarian
• established the Library Internship Task Force
• worked with the Townsend Center in naming our 2006-2007 Townsend Center
Fellow, Karen Munro.

Finally, we have almost established a committee to organize the LAUC-B Conference of
2007, whose theme will be “Librarian 2.0—the evolution of librarianship in the digital century.” I’d like to name the LAUC members who have volunteered to serve on this committee. They are: Karen Munro, Jean McKenzie, Jim Ronningen, and Allan Urbanic. We are looking for a couple more people to serve, so please let me know if you’re interested.

COMMUNICATION AND BUILDING BRIDGES
The third area we worked on was Communication and Building Bridges. Again, this is something that can always be improved, but I think we made some identifiable progress:
• We are continuing to update the LAUC-B Website (thank you Randy Brandt!)

• We built a bridge with the work being done for librarians by the UC-AFT when we added a link from the LAUC-B home page to the new UC-AFT website.
• We co-sponsored an event on May 3 to celebrate National Library Workers Day, which was established to advocate for better compensation for all library workers.
• We built a bridge with the Berkeley School of Information, when we formed a task force on library internships and we are developing a second task force on the relationship between the School of Information and The Library.
• We have worked on templates for the websites of LAUC-B Committees so that a baseline of information on the procedures of each committee will be readily available to all LAUC members

Our work is not done. We have three major tasks coming up:

• We will continue our work with the Committee on Diversity to complete their report and begin the implementation of its recommendations. Another goal in the area of Diversity was to work towards the establishment of a Diversity Fellow Program in The Library. This would be a two-year appointment for an entry-level librarian interested in diversity issues. With mentorship and training, this person would be ready for hiring at any other academic institution or perhaps by our own academic institution. Every two years a new fellow would be appointed. We will work with the Committee on Diversity on this initiative in the coming months.

• The Executive Committee will have a meeting with CAPA in July to discuss unresolved peer review issues. What we are planning for this meeting has never been done before—as far as I know. We will discuss questions, concerns and problems
that CAPA may have information and advice on, but which they are constrained by several factors from discussing with the Executive Committee. At the same time, however, the Executive Committee receives inquiries, concerns, complaints from LAUC members on some of these issues and we have no way of addressing them. Some of the constraints are:
 Confidentiality
 The perception that some issues are union issues only
 The very real fact that CAPA’s work in handling all the peer review cases is
all consuming and it has no time for following up on some of the problems in peer review it discovers

These constraints have led to a failure of communication among CAPA, ExComm, the UC-AFT, and our members who have urgent concerns. Some of these concerns are salary equity, the hiring of librarians in non-MLS positions, and not enough professional development funding to fully develop our careers. We hope that this meeting with CAPA will help us begin to address these and other issues in an effective way, but also to set up a mechanism of communication for issues that will come up in the future.

• Similarly, the Executive Committee will have a meeting in August devoted to a dialogue with representatives of the UC-AFT union to continue to build bridges with

that organization, but also to make further progress on some of the issues we will have discussed with CAPA by the time of that meeting.

Before I end this report I’d like to mention that LAUC-B as a body has been working on a great deal more than what I’ve discussed here. The committees have done a great job this year fulfilling their charges. I was struck by how many of our committee chairs and committee members are fairly new librarians, willing to take on not only the work of our association but also leadership roles early in their careers here. I would also like to acknowledge and thank—since this will be my last chance to do this in a public way—the members of the Executive Committee for their support and their excellent work: Teresa Mora, Lucia Diamond, Brian Quigley, Manuel Erviti, Rita Evans, Harrison Dekker, and Chris Tarr. We still have a lot of work to do, but from my experience working with them so far this year I’m confident that we can do a good job.